No recollection, I'm afraid. I presume, as Andy suggests, it was reviewed from a pre-production version and its release was delayed, giving it a second bite of the cherry when the software company sent the final release, and we'd all forgotten about it. Like I say, though, I don't recall the game so that is indeed just a guess.

Similar fate occurred to International Speedway: here and here.And to the budget re-release of Ghosts'n'Goblins: here and here.And to the budget re-release of Bubble Bobble: here and here. But this one might be actually 2 different edtions (both budget), the publishers are different.

The International Speedway one is weird. A Codemasters re-release of a Silverbird budget game from over 2 years previously...?

Anyway, you have definitely proved that the Millenium Warriors wasn't a once off. A little hard for the staff to keep track of what was reviewed and not, with all the staff changes over the years I guess, even with the official Zzapbible up to issue 60 or so.

More interesting finds! The original find of Millennium Warriors is still more interesting though, because it's the same company.

Those budget releases and re-releases looks like to me that companies were perhaps buying a 'license' to distribute the games, hence different companies/prices? However it works...

As for ZZAP reviewing them again, if the the price changes so should the review/scores? And I suppose, that maybe in later ZZAP's, the readership profile was changing (newer, younger readers) who may have missed original releases/reviews?

Similar fate occurred to International Speedway: here and here.And to the budget re-release of Ghosts'n'Goblins: here and here.And to the budget re-release of Bubble Bobble: here and here. But this one might be actually 2 different edtions (both budget), the publishers are different.

The different budget prices for Bubble Bobble don't make sense to me - £1.99 in 1988, then £3.99 in 1991.Though I guess there were less C64 active owners around in 1991 than four years earlier, so The Hit Squad had to do something to make a decent profit on their software purchase.I guess a similar reason was the justification for Spectrum games always being a pound or two cheaper than the 64's - or to flip it the other way 64 games were always a pound or two dearer than the Spectrum's.There was a larger installed base of Spectrums than the 64 in the UK. So the software houses could make sufficient profit with their title being slightly cheaper. I remember a letter in the Rrap asking Lloyd this very question. He gave a few reasons for the price difference though he didn't mention the 64/ZX owner number difference IIRC.

Actually the number of users made little difference - the C64 was still selling more games than the Spectrum by the 1990s.

The original full price difference was justified by the "larger memory" of the C64 demanding more work and hence a higher cost. Ultimate effectively got rid of that by pricing Sabre Wulf at £9.99 and that's where full price tape games settled. Towards the end of the commercial era they did creep up higher.

Budget prices started at £1.99 with Codemasters and Mastertronic. But they crept up with MAD (Mastertronic Added Dimension) charging £2.99, and by 1992 most were charging £3.99. So Bubble Bobble was published at the higher price by Hit Squad.

Actually the number of users made little difference - the C64 was still selling more games than the Spectrum by the 1990s.

I'm referring to the time period of late 84 to 87 when there were no equal prices. I don't have any hard numbers as evidence though from what I used to read in the computer press I'd make a pretty confident guess that at one point in that time period there were double the number of Spectrum owners to C64 owners. Which machine is going to give you more sales?

Quote:

The original full price difference was justified by the "larger memory" of the C64 demanding more work and hence a higher cost. Ultimate effectively got rid of that by pricing Sabre Wulf at £9.99 and that's where full price tape games settled. Towards the end of the commercial era they did creep up higher.

The Spectrum is the harder machine to program by far! Everything is done in software, unlike the 64 where today what we call hardware acceleration made things as easy as pie for coders. And to top that off the Spectrum guys had to squeeze the same game into 48K when we had 64K to utilize. More memory made things easier for us, not harder. Of course the only area where the 64 struggled was 3d games - and obviously the 64 programmers had to put more effort into making the 64 animate those lines at an acceptable speed. 3d was a minority sport in those 8-bit days though, unlike today where 2d is the fringe activity.

By the way, all i'll say about Ultimate is that they were shrewd businessmen who knew how to milk the games playing punter.

Quote:

Budget prices started at £1.99 with Codemasters and Mastertronic. But they crept up with MAD (Mastertronic Added Dimension) charging £2.99, and by 1992 most were charging £3.99. So Bubble Bobble was published at the higher price by Hit Squad.

Which is basically what I was saying to begin with. Less people buying 8-bit software resulted in higher prices as the market was spiraling towards commercial death.

I had always assumed that game price increases (eg £9.99 tape going to £10.99, £1.99 budget going to £2.99, etc) in the early '90's were to do with the VAT increase from 15% to 17.5%. That's probably a simplistic view, with other costs also being involved.

Which is basically what I was saying to begin with. Less people buying 8-bit software resulted in higher prices as the market was spiraling towards commercial death.

I'd agree with that but don't forget that inflation was rather high during most of the 80's although not enough to justify double the cost in say 5 years I'll admit. At least the full price software didn't double in price (unless you got yourself an Amiga of course!)

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